Web Development Glossary for Small Businesses

W3C: The international consortium of web developers, software and hardware companies and standards organizations that, in order to "promote [the World Wide Web's] evolution and ensure its interoperability," oversee the developing, formulating, maintaining and issuing of the standards, protocols, drafts and specifications for the Web.

Web-based Training: Training that utilizes the Internet technology to either stream or archive training video files over the web to train employees or clients all over the world. Includes the ability to make text documentation available for download to complement the online lesson.

Web Browser: A software application that interprets web page's HTML, CSS and scripting code to display the text and graphics in a meaningful way. Part of a web development quality control is to test a web design on the three most popular web browser applications: Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari.

Webcasting: The ability to mimic on-the-air broadcasting with the use of special web hosting services and streaming audio and/or AV software. Webcasts can be archived on some hosting services for later usage or retrieval.

Web Design: The use of the disciplines of graphic design, web content creation and search engine optimization.

Web Development: Web development encompasses the creation and coding of a websites underlying architecture and its integration with other applications such as blogs, ecommerce back-end or contact forms.

Web Optimization: The method of editing a web design and web content for higher search engine ranking and a higher conversion ratio of web page hits to contacts or sales leads.

Web Page Analytics: Web page analytics records data on web traffic behavior patterns on a website. Used to find the geographical sources of web visitors, bounce rate, most visited web pages, keywords and key phrases used to search for and find the website, and entry and exit pages. Analytics is used by web designers to improve a website or fine-tune a pay-per-click Internet marketing campaign.

Web Server: A computer using a software program like the open source Apache application that processes web browser requests for website files or date. Business websites are stored on hosting servers.

Web Standards The interoperable technologies, including guidelines, specifications, software and tools, the allow maximum use of the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web Consortium oversees the drafting and codifying of theses standards, three well-known web standards are the HTML, XML and CSS standards.

Website Hierarchy In web development, hierarchy is the site's web pages are organized. The page at the top of the hierarchy is the home page, normally named index.html. The sitemap.xml page gives a 0.1 to 1.0 sliding scale of page importance for search engines with the most important page(s) getting a 1.0 rating.

Website Navigation: Website navigation is the dropdown menus, buttons, or web page lists that allow Internet visitors to move from one web page to another (i.e. navigate the pages). Generally making most information accessible within 3 mouse clicks is found to be important in retaining web traffic.

XHTML: An acronym for Extensible Hypertext Markup Language. XHTML is a an improvement of the HTML standard by including elements of the XML vocabulary and standard. XHTML addresses the problems caused by proprietary, inconsistent or poor HTML coding.

XML Site Map: An XML file that serves as a website's table of contents with an added aspect of giving weight to a web page's importance. WML site maps are used by search engines to aid in their evaluation of the website's content.

Yahoo An informative search directory that is also used as second most popular search engine.

Zip: Zip is a compressed file format. Like the brand Xerox, "zip" morphed into a verb meaning to compress electronic files.